Empires & Allies Land Expansions: Everything you need to know

With any city-builder comes a constant battle for space, and even though Zynga's newest Facebook game Empires & Allies is about far more than the city-building portions, you'll still spend the majority of your time back on your Home Island(s) creating new military units, refining oil, processing wood and so on. You'll need space to build more and more buildings as you level up, and you'll eventually need to expand your land.

Players of CityVille will recognize the system here. Currently, your very first expansion comes at a price of 5,000 coins and 10 Liberty Bonds. Liberty Bonds are the equivalent of CityVille's Zoning Permits, and you'll need to collect them from friends in mass quantities to expand each and every time you do so. There's a catch here though. Whether by some oversight or intentional design choice, you can't currently ask for Liberty Bonds via the game's expansion menu (found in the game's store - the Hard Hat icon). Only when you've earned enough coins to purchase the expansion will you be able to ask for Liberty Bonds, forcing you to wait quite a while instead of accomplishing two tasks at once.

Either way, you can work around this and expand early, if you put your mind to it. Participate in battles frequently, and you'll receive Liberty Bonds as prizes. Furthermore, Liberty Bonds are currently available to send via the game's free gifts page, so your friends can send you as many (or as few, if you don't remind them) as they'd like.
Regardless of how you come across your Liberty Bonds, you'll go about actually adding the expansion to your land in the same way. Simply purchase the expansion from the store and then choose the area that you'd like to expand. Unfortunately, this is another system carried over from CityVille, as your entire city won't gain expanded limits; rather, you'll have to pick and choose where to add more land.

You'll want to plan your expansions ahead of time, as they cost more and more coins each time that you purchase a single lot of land. For example, after you've purchased the first land expansion for 5,000 coins, the second expansion doesn't come until you've reached 6,000 coins, and have collected another 10 Liberty Bonds.

It's a lengthy process, sure, but it's nothing we can't overcome, so long as Liberty Bonds stay readily available. If not, then we may really have a war on our hands.

What do you think of Empires & Allies' expansion process? Should the game have stuck to a FarmVille or FrontierVille system, where your initial square simply becomes larger, or do you like picking where each chunk of new land should go? Sound off in the comments.